Uhm... a pfork?

Name this item.



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It's a pasta fork!!! Now that's nifty. Slippery spaghetti no more!



Get it here. (Ouch, the price!)

Thai Chicken Basil and Cashews, ala Moonberry

Who doesn't love the smell of basil? It's the most incredible herb and its fragrance is intoxicating. I made Gai Pad Gra Pow for lunch today, which is a popular Thai dish of chicken stir-fried in basil. But I'm doing it up Moonberry-style, and added cashews into the dish for a bit of crunch and color. On with the ingredients:



Thai Chicken Basil and Cashews, ala Moonberry

Ingredients

2 Tbs Oil for stir-frying
1/2 lb Ground Chicken
2 Tbs Garlic, chopped
1 Tbs Sugar
2 Tbs Fish Sauce
1 bunch Fresh Basil
1/2 cup Roasted Cashews
1/2 cup Jalapeno Pepper, seeded and julienned
1 tsp Red Chili, chopped (optional)

Method

1. Stir-fry chopped garlic (and red chili, if used) in oil.
2. Add ground chicken, stir-fry until almost cooked.
3. Add sugar, fish sauce, and jalapeno pepper.
4. After the chicken is fully cooked, put in cashews and basil last. Basil wilt very quickly from the heat, so it's best to add at the very end.
5. Serve over white rice. This recipe feeds 2 adults.

- Ground Chicken can be substituted to other meats, like turkey, pork or beef.
- Jalapeno Pepper can be substituted with Bell Peppers, red orange green whichever you like.

Enjoy! :)

Let's ulek-ulek.

My mom recently posted on her Facebook page these photos of my baby nephew using the 'ulek-ulek' and I thought it's really funny, because I was just conversing with triciaseow over Livejournal about this spice grinding process. Supposedly, baby nephew was 'helping out' in the kitchen and he was grinding ketumbar. :p So cute.


Look at his hands, hahaha. Tiny left pinky up.


It delights me to see children looking busy in the kitchen. Yah, I'm sick like dat, kekekeke!

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On another sick note, I am getting a wii as birthday gift this year and when I began browsing online for which games to buy, the ones that captured my interest were the cooking/baking ones. :X And then the other night, I was frustrated (over recent stress-inducing matter which I shan't elaborate here) and bored so I started playing Nanny Mania. I totally rocked that game. *OCD alert*

:X

10,000,000 Gyozas Sold!

I stumbled upon this Rakuten page online randomly yesterday afternoon and was immediately attracted to the bright colorful images of dimsum items. I think Rakuten is sorta like the Japanese version of eBay, and this particular page is selling dimsum goodies, such as gyozas, pork buns and siewmais, via mail order. According to this page, they have already sold over ten million Kurobuta gyozas. :p Amusing.


The close-up photos of the Kurobuta gyozas with crispy slightly charred bottoms made my mouth water!


Yummy pork buns, siew long baos, gyozas and siewmais... Now, from a graphic designer's point of view, I gotta say the page itself is really heavy with images with in-your-face large type as well as you-can't-miss-it giant bright yellow starbursts. I'll be the first to admit that I tend to be biased towards Japanese design in general, and I marvel at the effective use of grid system here to present the ranking of popular items in their product line (towards bottom of page, image not shown here).


Looking at a food-related webpage like this makes me excited both as a foodie and a designer. ;P This reminds me of the Mitsuwa flyers that I get in my mailbox.

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Recently I met and had to discuss the body of my work with the director of a design studio who specializes in producing annual reports and publications. Interestingly, he remarked that my work is very commercial-oriented and advertising-driven. Oddly, I have never really thought of and regarded my work in that way before, but I quickly realized that what he said is true and I cannot deny it. Indeed I look at all my design projects from a marketing perspective, produce them as a form of advertising, and present them with a commercial value to the clients whom I work for.

Somehow, even though I'd love to produce design work that is more conceptual and editorial, the opportunities that have come my way were all commercial. I don't know how much coming from a business-minded family background or being vocationally-trained in advertising and communication designs have influenced my design approach, either way I've become conditioned. It has become an automatic thought process for me to look at a design project and find the commercial value in it for my clients.

Well, that's what I do. And it's gratifying.

Javanese Soto Ayam

I woke up on Sunday morning, craving for Soto Ayam. Soto Ayam is Javanese Chicken Soup, flavoured mainly with tumeric plus a bunch of other spices. You'll see them all in the recipe below. There are many variations of Soto, including Soto Banjar, Soto Medan, Soto Madura (their names are derived from the geographic regions that serve this, and the broth or toppings are slightly varied one way or another). Soto Madura, which I'm also fond of eating, is sometimes referred to as Soto Daging and it contains chunks of beef, tripes and miscellaneous innards. Daging means meat, Ayam means chicken. My parents like to serve Soto Ayam for breakfast over white rice, but I am happy just having the soup by itself and when I make it at home, I add more cabbage, glass noodles and potatoes to make the soup heartier and more filling.



Now, normally when I make Soto Ayam, I use an instant pre-made spice mix that I easily get from the Asian supermarkets near my house in Elmhurst. Interestingly enough, now that I am in Singapore, I was not able to find these pre-made spice packets in the supermarkets nearby. (Uhm, hello... neighbouring countries!??) Determined to have Soto Ayam no matter what, I decided to tackle making it from scratch and grind the actual spices. I searched for some recipes online, found one that was simple enough to reference and adapted it with the ingredients that I could get my hands on during my supermarket spree.

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Recipe for Soto Ayam

Ingredients:

1/2 Boneless Chicken Breast, boiled and shredded
1 stalk Lemongrass, cut into 3 sections
1 can Chicken Broth
1 glass Water

Spice Paste:

4 Shallots, chopped
3 cloves Garlic, chopped
2 pieces Turmeric, peeled and chopped
2-inch piece Galangal, peeled and sliced
2-inch piece Ginger, peeled and sliced
1 tablespoon Fresh Lime Juice

Other ingredients:

3 Potatoes, cut into wedges
2 cups Cabbage, sliced
2 cups Bean Sprouts
2 small packages Glass Noodles
1 Lime, cut into wedges
2 Hard-boiled Eggs, sliced

Toppings:

Scallion, chopped
Cilantro, chopped
Deep-fried Shallot Slices

Method:

Blend the spice paste in a food processor. Stirfry the spice paste in an oiled frying pan and wait for it to turn light brown. Wrap the spice paste in cheesecloth, before adding it into a pot filled with chicken broth, lemongrass and water. Cover the pot, lower the heat and simmer for 30 to 40 minutes. Add salt to taste.

In another pot of boiling water, boil potato wedges, blanch beansprouts, pre-soaked glass noddles, cabbages and transfer them into a bowl once they are cooked. Add in shredded chicken, toppings and pour the hot broth into the bowl. Serve with lime wedges.

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Ta-dahh!!! Soto Ayam, yum!



I am quite pleased with the overall result of my made-from-scratch Soto Ayam attempt. It tastes the same as it normally does whenever I use the pre-made spice packet. However, it does not have the same flavour as the original - and by original, I mean those sold by street vendors in Surabaya. I can't quite pinpoint where the discrepancy lies, as admittedly my tastebuds have been conditioned by the adulterated version from using a pre-made spice packet. (Living overseas kinda does that to ya, whether you like it or not.) I can tell you that authentic Javanese Soto Ayam served in Indonesia has a much more robust-flavoured broth. I dunno, kick up the tumeric maybe?

Oh, speaking of tumeric... Couple of weeks ago, I was ranting over Twitter and Facebook about going in circles trying to identify fresh galangal. The only galangal I had come across were the occasional pieces that float inside my Tom Kha Gai soup and I don't remember ever seeing a fresh one before. All I knew is that it sorta looked like ginger. So I went to three different supermarkets and a wet market, looking for galangal but no one in these markets seemed to refer to it by its English name. The shelves had Young Ginger 姜, Old Ginger 老姜, Yellow Ginger 黃姜. The literal Chinese translations of these words tacked on the product labels made it even more confusing for me. Via a process of elimination, I picked Yellow Ginger but realized later on I made a mistake. Yellow Ginger = Tumeric. O_O!?!? Again, I had never used fresh tumeric before... only in dried powder form. In the end, I managed to find galangal aka Blue Ginger aka 藍姜 at FairPrice Finest, but it wasn't after shuttling to and fro all these markets.



Look at this, and tell me they don't look similar!!!!!
From left to right: Galangal, Ginger, Tumeric.

So that sums up my first foray into acquiring fresh spices. I've picked up a lot of Asian recipe books lately and pretty much all of them call for some sort of ingredients which I've only encountered in processed form (bottled or dried) before. Cooking with these spices in raw form is definitely worthwhile, as I believe the flavours are more potent.

I'm going to discuss with my parents about making Soto Ayam at home and find out if they have any tips on the ratio of spices to use in order to make it taste closer to the street vendor version.